SUO: *Date 25 Feb 2002
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Item. Dictation & Negotiation
BA = Bill Andersen
Bill,
In a genuinely open democratic society, legislation and negotiation are,
of course, intertwined, but I interpret John Sowa to be using the word
"legislation" in the sense of a "law-giver" or an ex cathedra dictator
of the rules of a realm.
The problems that you indicate here are the very ones for which
the theory of manifolds was initially long ago invented, namely,
that of maintaining translatability or transfunctionality among
different ways of looking at what appears notwithstanding to be
the same objectively extended space of insistently real objects,
when no one "point of view" (POV) or "frame of reference" (FOR)
can legitimately be posed to have ontological priority over any
of the others in a given equivalence class of such perspectives.
I am hardly the first to make this observation, and several
previous generations of thinkers have already looked at how
this assembly of ideas from pure mathematics, first applied
with great success in physics, might be brought to bear on
the human sciences, the philosophy of knowledge, and even
the practice of living together in just social orders.
For example:
The "family resemblances" of Wittgenstein.
The "overlapping consensus" of Polanyi.
| Michael Polanyi,
|'Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi',
| Marjorie Grene (ed.), University of Chicago Press,
| Chicago, IL, 1969.
| Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch,
|'Meaning',
| University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1975.
The "justice as fairness" of Rawls.
| John Rawls,
|'A Theory of Justice',
| Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971.
If folks hereabouts would just listen up to what other voices are saying,
or even look back on their own recent history, they would be able to see
what ought to be increasingly obvious here, that the SUO Project, even at
its best, will not yield any sort of "Total Ontological Meta-Basis" (TOMB)
that finally enfolds all that does or might or must exist, but can at best
eventuate in yet another point view and a story of being among all the rest.
If the story is not a good one, it will go the way of 'Principia Mathematica'
and "Unified Scientism". Continental thinkers have been pointing this out for
quite some time now, but discontinental thinkers have a chronicological amnesia.
Further comments interspersed:
BA: This is for John Sowa (and interested others) ...
BA: John, a question has been bothering me about your characterization
of the "negotiation" vs "legislation" approach to IS integration.
From what I've been able to gather from the discussion and your
writings you've referenced in the posts, the idea is that only
"small adjustments" need to be made to some kinds of naïve
inter-system mappings when they prove inadaquate, the claim
here being that this is somehow a different task (I mean
formally here) than the one of mapping each system to
a subsuming ontology.
BA: Considering the problem abstractly, the task is to make the
semantics of the two (n) systems compatible over some relevant
subset of functionality. For me, this means that the relevant
terms (logical database structure, function names, etc) "mean"
the "same" thing from the perspectives of the member systems.
As always, the critical question is what you mean by semantics.
Formal semantics, in its current use, is no kind of substitute
for a theory of objective reference, and any attempt to force
it into this role introduces a semantic torsion that leads our
entire sense of meaning from drift to distortion to contortion
to final catastrophic collapse in a whirlwind of coriolis farces.
If you catch my drift ...
BA: The real action here is to arrive at some reasonable meaning for
the words "mean" and "same" in the above (thus the scare quotes),
even prior to a discussion on how one might procedurally compute
meaning and sameness.
BA: It seems also inescapable that the meanings of "mean" and "same" will have to
do exclusively with formal properties of axioms (stated or not) constraining
the interpretation of the terms manifest by the participating systems.
The hurricane only seems inescapable to those who
have been heedless enough of the weather advisory
to let their own courses intersect its trajectory.
BA: So, the question is: How is it that a process of negotiation
arrives at the relevant computation over these formal properties,
where a mapping to a third, well understood standard ontology cannot
arrive at the relevant computation over these properties? I'm sensing
some of the buzzwordology present when talking about "agents" here in
the talk about "negotiation".
The form of the question must itself be questioned,
as the formality of it obviates the hope of answer.
Interested Other,
Jon Awbrey
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